[OPE] McCartney concert in the Hayarkon - anything politically incorrect with silly love songs?

I think what John Lennon said in the Albert Hall performance was something like "Would those of you in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."

"Tickets are already on sale online and range from 490 shekels to 1,500 shekels, roughly between $140 and $427 U.S. dollars. Promoters are marketing the concert as one of the biggest performances for the country and hope that McCartney's show will pave the road for other stars to travel to Israel, according to CNN.com. The concert will cost around $10 million to produce and promoters are hoping to make a profit." http://thecelebritycafe.com/features/19410.html McCartney reportedly gets a £2.3m fee for the one-off concert. There's a crew of about a hundred people.

Talk about going up in the world - here's a link to some old Beatles tickets for comparison. http://www.tracks.co.uk/acatalog/Beatles_1964_Concert_Tickets.html Well, obviously McCartney doesn't do it for the money, he's got plenty of it, he can handle quite a few more divorce cases if he needs to.

Can you really say though that a pop musician endorses a political system simply by being there, in that place? I don't find that really credible, I think you have to judge it on the music he or she actually plays, on the actual performance, and not judge it before it has even been played yet. A lot of the concert goers probably don't endorse the political system either.

Personally I think musicians should be able to play where they want to play, provided they stick with the local norms of civility, and if they don't, they hear about it soon enough. McCartney is taking a risk in that sense, but what kind of world do we live in, if you have to dance and sweat around the stage in a bulletproof suit, or even behind barbed wire, to dodge would-be assassins? Is that the kind of world we want?

You wouldn't make yourself popular or serve a cause by murdering McCartney, I would think, to the contrary. But is there a threat anyway? Probably not http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75354 It might be different if McCartney was a real tyrant, but I haven't seen good evidence for that other than the usual marital and business troubles which rock stars have, with the ego's they have. You'd simply have to make a different protest sound, imagine something different yourself. The more pertinent question is what it all means to people over there.

There are those who will prattle about the limits of tolerance... the real issue concerns the world we really want compared to what we live in, and you can hear that in their music as well. Music brings people together, they say, and okay then you wonder who exactly is being brought together, and whether you want to be part of that yourself. For example, McCartney will say "Friends First", and who are your friends then?

McCartney wouldn't play in China, because of the fur issue... what if people are treated worse than animals, can you be in favour of letting that under your skin? No doubt he wouldn't be. But point is, you can't legislate pop musicians about all that in their music, and people from all walks of life are going to enjoy pop music anyway, even if they try to ban it. For a musician, there's different ways to skin a cat, you might say.

All considered, I think that pop music was one of the most revolutionary things that happened in my lifetime, it really changed and inspired people's lives, including mine. I still remember the excitement I had as a 12 year old buying George Harrison's single "What is life" using some of the money I earnt in the holidays working a stint in Granddad's factory (they got me taking the wrongly printed wrappers off little blocks of compressed potplant earth for days, among other things). Things are different nowadays I suppose, when you have to endure the jingles while you don't even want to listen to them, and it often becomes more like advertising propaganda, more form than content.

It's better if it's live, not dead.

Jurriaan

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Received on Tue Sep 16 18:57:25 2008